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Tuesday, November 18, 2008

New At Google This Week

Monday:

Announcing Sketchup 7 - Google announced the the launch of Google SketchUp 7. SketchUp is a 3D modeling program designed for architects, civil engineers, filmmakers, game developers, and related professions. It also includes features to facilitate the placement of models in Google Earth. It was designed to be more intuitive, flexible, and easier to use than other 3D CAD programs.

Want to track Adobe Flash? Now you can! - Today, at the Adobe MAX Conference in San Francisco, in a joint collaboration with our friends at Adobe and a few ace third party developers, we announced a simplified solution for tracking Flash content for everyone, called Google Analytics Tracking For Adobe Flash.

Now you can speak to Google Mobile App on your iPhone - Google has added voice search to Google Mobile App for the iPhone. The new Google Mobile App for iPhone makes it possible for you to do a Google web search using only your voice. Just hold the phone to your ear, wait for the beep, and say what you're looking for. That's it. Just talk. Once the App is on, you don't have to push any buttons to search. For more details checkout the Official Google Mobile Blog.

Ads In New Places - Google says they are experimenting with placement of text and images ads. Searchers will notice ads placed in search results that haven't traditionally seen them such as image searches. We'll also see more Sponsored Videos and click-to-buy on YouTube, as well as ads in Google Finance.

Tuesday:

Life Photo Archive Available On Google Image Search - Google announced the availability of never-before-seen images from the LIFE photo archive. This effort to bring offline images online was inspired by our mission to organize all the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. This collection of newly-digitized images includes photos and etchings produced and owned by LIFE dating all the way back to the 1750s.

Get a headstart on the holidays with Docs templates - The holidays are a time to celebrate with family and friends, but preparing for the holidays can sometimes be time-consuming and stressful. Whether you're still planning your Thanksgiving party, or already working on your gift shopping list, you might want to check out our new templates for the holidays -- a series of templates designed to help make your holidays a little more efficient (and cost-effective, too).

You'll find everything from party invites, holiday cards, to gift tags and much more. We've highlighted a few of our favorites below. These ones in particular were custom-designed by Googlers; and as with all of our templates, they are available to you for free in our Template Gallery.

Spice up your inbox with colors and themes - Gmail fans have been building unofficial extensions to spice up their inboxes for a while, but up til now themes haven't been an integral part of Gmail. We wanted to go beyond simple color customization, so out of the 30 odd themes we're launching today, there's a shiny theme with chrome styling, another one that turns your inbox into a retro notepad, nature themes that change scenery over time, weather driven themes that can rain on your mailbox, and fun characters to keep you in good company. There's even an old school ascii theme (Terminal) which was the result of a bet between two engineers -- it's not exactly practical, but it's great for testing out your geek cred. We've also done a minor facelift to Gmail's default look to make it crisper and cleaner -- you might notice a few colors and pixels shifted around here and there.

Google Sync for BlackBerry: Now with contacts - You asked for it, so here it is. We're happy to announce that in the latest update to Google Sync for BlackBerry, we've added two-way contacts synchronization. This new functionality will enable you to sync your handheld's built-in address book with your Gmail contacts. This all happens in the background and over the air, so your information is always up to date, no matter where you are or what you're doing.

Once you've installed Sync, all your information will be safe in your Google account. If you ever lose your phone or buy a new one, getting your address book and calendar to your new device is as easy as installing Sync. Current and new Google Sync users can try Google Sync today by visiting m.google.com/sync from their BlackBerry browser.

Thursday:

360 degree panoramas in Google Earth - This week, we've started to feature another layer in the Google Earth Gallery, showing several thousand panoramic views provided by 360cities.net. This layer contains exciting 360 degree panoramas from a variety of great photographs taken all over the world!

Last month, we offered a Clean Energy 2030 proposal for how the U.S. can dramatically scale up renewable energy, become smarter about how we use energy, and deploy millions of plug-in electric cars. Our energy team has continued crunching the numbers and just posted new data on job creation and cost savings on our knol. We'll keep updating the information and encourage everyone to take a look and comment - and offer alternative approaches if you disagree.

SearchWiki: make search your own - Have you ever wanted to mark up Google search results? Maybe you're an avid hiker and the trail map site you always go to is in the 4th or 5th position and you want to move it to the top. Or perhaps it's not there at all and you'd like to add it. Or maybe you'd like to add some notes about what you found on that site and why you thought it was useful. Starting today you can do all this and tailor Google search results to best meet your needs. View our follow up post.

Friday:

Some favorite Google Maps features now for iPhone - I waited in line on launch day to buy my first-generation iPhone, and ever since then it has never left my side. The best part is that it keeps getting more useful with every software upgrade Apple puts out. This time around, Apple has improved their version of Google Maps by putting even more Google features in your pocket.